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A critical look at the work of one of the twentieth century's most influential playwrights emerges from the viewpoint of numerous Beckett actors and directors and includes the author's personal experiences as well.
Twelve actresses from seven countries are interviewed about their experience of performing in plays by Samuel Beckett, including their physical and psychological preparation. An additional 19 essays explore critical themes relating to the plays as fiction, as fiction becoming drama, and as drama on stage, radio, and television. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
This book draws on the theatrical thinking of Samuel Beckett and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to propose a method for research undertaken at the borders of performance and philosophy. Exploring how Beckett fabricates encounters with the impossible and the unthinkable in performance, it asks how philosophy can approach what cannot be thought while honouring and preserving its alterity. Employing its method, it creates a series of encounters between aspects of Beckett’s theatrical practice and a range of concepts drawn from Deleuze’s philosophy. Through the force of these encounters, a new range of concepts is invented. These provide novel ways of thinking affect and the body in performance; the possibility of theatrical automation; and the importance of failure and invention in our attempts to respond to performance encounters. Further, this book includes new approaches to Beckett’s later theatrical work and provides an overview of Deleuze’s conception of philosophical practice as an ongoing struggle to think with immanence.
Interviews with and essays by twenty-two prominent directors of Samuel Beckett's work
A novel about three women at turning points in their lives, and the one night that changes everything. One night, three women go to the theater to see a play. Wildfires are burning in the hills outside, but inside the theater it is time for the performance to take over. Margot is a successful, flinty professor on the cusp of retirement, distracted by her fraught relationship with her adult son and her ailing husband. After a traumatic past, Ivy is is now a philanthropist with a seemingly perfect life. Summer is a young drama student, an usher at the theater, and frantically worried for her girlfriend whose parents live in the fire zone. While the performance unfolds on stage, so does the compelling trajectory that will bring these three women together, changing them all. Deliciously intimate and yet emotionally wide-ranging, The Performance is a novel that both explores the inner lives of women as it underscores the power of art and memory to transform us.
Theatre on Trial is the first full-length analysis of Samuel Beckett's later drama in the context of contemporary theatre. Audrey McMullan employs a close, textual examination of the later plays as a springboard for exploring ideas around authority, voyeurism, gender and the ideology of stage and TV space. Her application of deconstruction and psychoanalytic feminism to Beckett's work will break new and exciting ground.
Evolutionary theory made its stage debut as early as the 1840s, reflecting a scientific advancement that was fast changing the world. Tracing this development in dozens of mainstream European and American plays, as well as in circus, vaudeville, pantomime, and "missing link" performances, Theatre and Evolution from Ibsen to Beckett reveals the deep, transformative entanglement among science, art, and culture in modern times. The stage proved to be no mere handmaiden to evolutionary science, though, often resisting and altering the ideas at its core. Many dramatists cast suspicion on the arguments of evolutionary theory and rejected its claims, even as they entertained its thrilling possibilities. Engaging directly with the relation of science and culture, this book considers the influence of not only Darwin but also Lamarck, Chambers, Spencer, Wallace, Haeckel, de Vries, and other evolutionists on 150 years of theater. It shares significant new insights into the work of Ibsen, Shaw, Wilder, and Beckett, and writes female playwrights, such as Susan Glaspell and Elizabeth Baker, into the theatrical record, unpacking their dramatic explorations of biological determinism, gender essentialism, the maternal instinct, and the "cult of motherhood." It is likely that more people encountered evolution at the theater than through any other art form in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Considering the liveliness and immediacy of the theater and its reliance on a diverse community of spectators and the power that entails, this book is a key text for grasping the extent of the public's adaptation to the new theory and the legacy of its representation on the perceived legitimacy (or illegitimacy) of scientific work.
An indispensable guide to the oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, spanning sixty years
Providing an overview of existing scholarship on Beckett and performance, this title will place Beckett's drama for theatre, film, television and radio in the context of highly contemporary discourses of subjectivity, embodiment, performance and technology.
Combining phenomenological analysis and affect theory, this book takes stock of the various ways in which the body in Samuel Beckett's drama participates in the affective ecology of performance. If the post-human innovation up until the present has worked to decentre the 'human', by rendering notions of thinking, experience, and affect impersonal and by developing new models of expression and communication, then this innovation seems to be already underway in Beckett's theatre of affect where the assault against language is made possible through the thematising of the body as a mode of encountering presence. The corporeal turn in Beckett's drama therefore has far-reaching implications for the production of meaning in his work.